A laptop

At last, a laptop.

Not a new one. An old one. That Grand Man — the believer in redundancies, backups, covering-your-ass — made me a gift of a backup laptop when I started teaching. It was shortly after that that Renny smashed the screen on the first one, and the backup became primary.

When that one died two weeks ago, I brought both to the computer store. They fixed this one first.

Tonight when I brought it to life all I could think of was maniacal Dave, the computer that sat silent in space after killing its crew in the movie 2001.

The last e-mail I sent is dated October 18, 2007 — two years and two days ago. It is a note to Cute Husband telling him I had found a company that would make sure The House contained no lead dust when we turned it over to the new owners.

There were other e-mails — missives from lawyers and brokers. And another to Cute Husband, “I really like that new girl Sunbeam. I want her to come sit for us in the new place.”

The browser history was an interesting read. I was Goggling cleaning companies and furniture and the schools in our prospective hometown. There’s no iTunes on here, no Twitter, and no pictures of Eden.

In my drafts, this note to a friend, “I’m kind of in love with this little farm house. Totally impractical, tiny, not a square angle in the place. Wild, overgrown yard, skylights, hardwood and fire places. We should run, screaming in the other direction, buy something bigger, sensible, new, with less yard. But for the last months since her death I’ve watched so much I care about slip away and I have let myself fall in love with this house in all its impracticality and now I don’t think I can bear to let it slip away, too. I find myself wanting to see what it looks like buried in snow. I want to plant things in the yard and fill the house with the smell of baking bread.”

Too many commas, I thought when I read it. And too many adjectives and too much ache that I don’t want to feel again.

I know why I didn’t send the e-mail — it revealed more than I wanted it to. Of my struggle to find out who we were away from The House, to balance financial stability with a desperation to love wherever we landed.

There were over 1,500 e-mails in the inbox. I would have deleted them long ago as a matter of course; their survival elevates them.

One of my favorite trickeries of the space time continuum is illustrated by a moving video: if you film me walking from my kitchen to the front door, I appear in constant motion. But if you stop the film at any point along the line you get a still shot. A single, unmoving image.

Motion is nothing more than an infinity of unmoving images.

This is evolution: the line of hunched over ape slowly standing into erect human.

I read the e-mails, and then I deleted them.

The gift of humanity — to have a past, to let it go.

I cleaned up the hard drive, getting rid of old student papers, archiving pictures. I started migrating the new stuff in, figuring out how to get the iPod and the camera on here, get my new e-mail address to load to the inbox.

The laptop is still a snapshot, I know that. But it can’t show me to myself now anymore than I can perfectly freeze myself on a walk between here and the kitchen door.

I am a living thing, each heartbeat in its time and then gone forever.

And for the record: the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse is divine in snow.